Depends on the medication and the dosage. I am not a psych nurse, but I do work closely with one. Some such as Seraquil, in lower dosages, induce sleep. Some of the traditional anti-psychotic meds will probibly make you jittery and give you dry mouth. My suggestion would be to not take them if they are not prescribed for you. A six pack of Budweiser is a better recreational drug.

I was coming in just to post about Seroquel actually, my son recently began taking it as a sleeping aid. His eyes just about bugged out of his head when the doc casually mentioned "It's an anti-psychotic and blah blah blah". I think he thinks it gives him some weird coolness points.

He's taken clonidine as a sleep sedative for years, despite not having high blood pressure. I wouldn't think anti-psy drugs would be exempt from the off-label usages common in every other class of meds, right?

As an adolescent I was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia.
I was placed on an anti-psychotic which had the side effect of making me sleep approximately 20 hours per day. I quite literally fell out of my chair at school after sleeping 12 hours the night before school.
Dunno if my reaction would have been any different if I *was* schizophrenic.

I have taken a lot of psychiatric drugs and many of them were before I was correctly diagnosed (bipolar) so I was taking drugs for things I didn't really have. You mainly just end up with the unpleasant side-effects and not much else. Some caused weird mood changes. I am on lithium now and it is a life-saver for me. If you took it, well it is just an element, it probably wouldn't do much of anything to you except maybe give you hand tremors and dangerous lithium toxicity in higher doses. Most of them certainly won't do anything pleasant for you or give you any cool effects.

I was accidently given an anti-psychotic drug by mistake at Walgreens. The pills were very, very similar to the Rx I should have gotten. By the time I took the second doses, I was a walking zombie. My head felt like it was a huge cotton pillow, I was lethargic, my reaction times were shot to hell and I was suffering from a huge thirst.

When we got it straightened out, it took a couple of days for them to wear off and all I could think was: wow, if this is what it takes to help people that are out of whack get back to normal, they've got problems that I will never be able to comprehend. It certainly changed my point of view concerning mentally ill folks.

One of my in-laws was accidentally given an anti-schizophrenic medicine. He was supposed to have been given a Parkinson's medication (the names were very similar). Turns out the anti-schizophrenic was a dopamine suppressor.

Needless to say, giving someone who has low dopamine a dopamine suppressor tends to make your symptoms worse, not better.

Antipsychotic meds are in no way tailored to do something highly specialized in the brains of schizophrenics (&etc); they are blunt, clumsy pharmaceuticals that interfere in what nerve cells do for a living in a broad general sense. The best they've been able to do is concentrate their effects on the nerves that process emotions and cognitions more than on the sensory and motor nerves, and even there, their track record isn't good.

In short, they do the exact same thing to you as they do to a schizophrenic. After you've been on them awhile you don't sleep as much but you still shuffle around like a zombie. You can't run your mind except at a really basic level, any more than you can easily process calculus problems if your'e overloaded on strong antihistamines.

Try an atypical or a phenothiazine for a couple weeks and then come back and we'll talk about why schizophrenics so often don't like to take their meds.

I was given a low dose of an atypical antipsychotic as part of attempts to tackle problems with anxiety....I was on half the normal starting dose, and was just as AHunter3 describes. I lasted for two weeks before deciding I wasn't taking it any more. I can't possibly imagine what it must be like on sixteen times that dosage.

I was given the anti psychotic Compazine for nausea once. I took a pill right before I got on an airplane.

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Compazine is an anti-emetic and used to treat nausea, not psychiatric disorders.
It might be prescribed to a psych patient for calming purposes, as most people find it may induce sleepiness. Were you perhaps given something else with a similar name?

I was on Abilify for awhile in an attempt to figure out where my paranoia was coming from, and it didn't do anything. Well it made me twitchy, nervous, a compulsive yawner/stretcher, constantly nauseated to the point of not eating for days, but psychologically it had no effect on me whatsoever.

Ok, I have coprolalia, and I took an antipsychotic, cause I hate having it. The thing is, it's very addictive. It makes you seriously high though, major light show, really horny too. So, it's like being on X without the depression, and bad ass synasthesia. Getting off it though is horrible. Can also make you really fat, and unable to sleep. It really depends, I get rare side effects, and loose tons of weight and get complete opposite of what everyone has.

Seriously not recommended, unless absolutely needed or requested. My friends used to steal my medication to get high off it. Very weird.

I was Rx'd Seroquel for insomnia, it did not help me sleep but made me feel like I had Alzheimer's at 20 and gave me a strange reaction like tardive dyskinesia.

I laid in bed until at some point I felt COMPELLED squirm and move and then I would "freeze" in mid move. Until the urge to start moving again got unbearable so I did until I would again freeze. This went on for HOURS and was hellish but I couldn't call for help or even form a thought really.

The next morning I felt mentally retarded, or like I had Alzheimer's because I was drooling and just staring off into space. I could not form thoughts in my head, it was like there was a cloud that kept me from thinking and by the time I was thinking around it slowly I'd forget what I was doing. This was one of the worst experiences of my life, I don't know how to communicate how hellish this was.

Nothing weird happened. I didn't have hallucinations, if that's what the OP is wondering. My repetitive thoughts simmered down just a little, but I started having tardive dyskinesia (to go along with the regular dyskinesia). I just couldn't handle it and stopped after about half a year.

I will say that the anti-depressant that I'm on now is causing me to have extremely realistic and crazy dreams. The kind that you remember all day long and have to keep assuring yourself weren't real. One of the side effects of this drug is psychosis, since it increases dopamine availability (making it contraindicated in people with mania and schizophrenia). So it's not just anti-psychotics that can make you "insane in the membrane".

He's taken clonidine as a sleep sedative for years, despite not having high blood pressure. I wouldn't think anti-psy drugs would be exempt from the off-label usages common in every other class of meds, right?

I saw a program about this on a news magazine (Maybe "60 Minutes') where this is happening a lot. Apparently the anti-depressants are regulated heavily for off-label usage, but the anti-pys drugs aren't.

So a doctor may want to use an anti-depressant but can't, so he'll chose an anti-psychotic instead.

Why does clonidine make one sleepy? I do believe it is also the one of my 4 BP meds that the cardiologist has me on that slows down my heartbeat to a normal pace as well as help lower the BP from 210/190 to non-exploding head levels.

[It is responsible for my thrice daily nap attacks ... I nap after my morning and noon doses, and just go to bed after my nighttime dose, life works better if I just sleep when the drugs make me though unfortunately I wake up in the middle of the night for 4 or 5 hours because of the damned segmented sleep crap.]

I saw a program about this on a news magazine (Maybe "60 Minutes') where this is happening a lot. Apparently the anti-depressants are regulated heavily for off-label usage, but the anti-pys drugs aren't.

So a doctor may want to use an anti-depressant but can't, so he'll chose an anti-psychotic instead.

Really? I was prescribed anti-depressant nortriptyline once for an off label use, and there didn't seem to be any restriction. It also did nothing, as far as I could tell, including treating my tinnitus.

I saw a program about this on a news magazine (Maybe "60 Minutes') where this is happening a lot. Apparently the anti-depressants are regulated heavily for off-label usage, but the anti-pys drugs aren't.

So a doctor may want to use an anti-depressant but can't, so he'll chose an anti-psychotic instead.

I'm not aware of this. I am prescribed two different anti-depressants; one is a tricyclic antidepressant and the other is an SSRI anti-depressant. Both of these medications are prescribed off-label for the treatment/prevention of migraine headaches.

Why does clonidine make one sleepy? I do believe it is also the one of my 4 BP meds that the cardiologist has me on that slows down my heartbeat to a normal pace as well as help lower the BP from 210/190 to non-exploding head levels.

[It is responsible for my thrice daily nap attacks ... I nap after my morning and noon doses, and just go to bed after my nighttime dose, life works better if I just sleep when the drugs make me though unfortunately I wake up in the middle of the night for 4 or 5 hours because of the damned segmented sleep crap.]

I don't think you're suggesting so, clonidine is not an antipsychotic or anything similar. I was told it has an extremely short half-life, so to take it for the purposes I did I either had to take several a day, or the patch, which I went with. I didn't note any great difference in tiredness, although I have been drowsy lately. I switched to similar guanfacine, because the patch was a PITA. I can't time-match the drowsiness so I dunno.

I was on atypical antipsychotics Zyprexa (Olanzapine) and Risperdal (Risperidone). I'm not sure why, either OCD or suspected bipolar? I quit when I started to nod off at the wheel.

There's the drug Abilify on TV. They sell it as an adjunct like BuSpar (e.g. take along with an antidepressant to boost). Thing is, it is also a mood stabilizer and antipsychotic, but I think they don't want to scare away the unipolar depression people.

I agree that if someone not used to it or not used to that much of it takes them, being zonked out is the most likely, and probably only effect. A few ancedotes:

On Parking Wars someone got his car towed after a DUI. He took his girlfriend's Seroquel by mistake and fell asleep at a red light.

In Europe Seroquel got mixed in with some OTC painkiller. The company recalled them all but said "drowsyness" was the worst that would happend if someone took it by mistake.

(Seroquel is vary nondescript looking, my XR 150 tablets are the exact same size, shape, and color of Excedrin caplets. At $10 a pill couldn't they make them look pretty???)

The cliche of being put in straightjackets at psyche hospitals really doesn't happen any more, instead the try to restrain people chemically. You guessed it, massive amounts of anti-psychotics. Unlike Benzos you don't need to worry about them stopping breathing, they'll just go to sleep and wake up with a few hours later.

Great story:
Ex gf, then married, and in the party mode, got some anti psychs from one of her party friends. She took one, and it kept her buzzed for about a day. Her husband, a total retard when it came to drugs, took something like 5 of them. First sign of trouble-impotence. Next sign-his mouth would fly open, and wouldn't shut. He would be there with his eyes bugging out in shock, and trying to speak, but he couldn't close his mouth. Next sign-mouth would slam shut, and he couldn't open it.This went on for a couple of days, and he lost some of his teeth because of it. Even funnier (in retrospect) he was a cab driver at the time, and this bizarre behavior (excepting the impotence, I'm guessing) was going on while he had customers in the cab! Finally, his wife took him to the ER. She told him not to tell them that he got the drugs from her. Of course the cops came in, and as she was walking to his room in ER, she heard her husband tell the cops "I got them from my wife. I don't know where she got them from." She left.

I was coming in just to post about Seroquel actually, my son recently began taking it as a sleeping aid. His eyes just about bugged out of his head when the doc casually mentioned "It's an anti-psychotic and blah blah blah". I think he thinks it gives him some weird coolness points.

He's taken clonidine as a sleep sedative for years, despite not having high blood pressure. I wouldn't think anti-psy drugs would be exempt from the off-label usages common in every other class of meds, right?

Be careful with Clonidine; they gave it to me in the emergency room and it made me feel so terrible I thought if I had to feel like that for very long I would kill myself. I literally could not stand feeling that way physically. After I figured out what was causing it I switched bp meds. It was indescribable; as if I was rotting from the inside out and my brain could not figure out what was happening so it went into crisis mode. A feeling like you absolutely cannot cope with anything. Never before or since.

Cool. The same is true for most psychiatric drugs: they have the precision of a cylinder-choke shotgun. Like if you make one that only targets dopamine, and not norepinephrine, epinephrine, or even serotonin, then great. However, it doesn't help if it targets all dopaminergic systems along with the ones associated with schizophrenia, so you get all kinds of side effects along with it.